Twelve Drummers Drumming (48 page)

And then he had watched, with growing numbness, and yet somehow with little surprise, as Alastair continued down Church Walk, past the Old School Room without so much as a glance or hesitation, past the Church House Inn, and around the corner to where he had parked his car. A moment later Alastair’s late-model
Mercedes shot across the opening to Church Walk, disappeared momentarily behind the stone wall bordering Poynton Shute, then reappeared, heading—there was no doubt—up Thorn Hill to Westways, to home, to Julia, as if the last few hours had had no more consequence than a game of golf.

He had released a moan of despair then, standing in the shadow of the north porch where only that morning he had been sharing greetings with parishioners.

Alastair had martyred him to the seal of the confessional.

He knew all.

He could say nothing.

A bell struck from below, preternaturally loud, startling him. It struck again. It was the clock, chiming the hour. He counted six, then checked his watch to confirm, as if the Victorian clockworks were an unreliable instrument.
Miranda and Madrun will be wondering where I’ve got to
, he thought, looking beyond the church roof towards the vicarage nestled in its frame of beeches. Madrun, inured to custom, would be starting to prepare a light supper. Of Miranda he was less certain. Watching TV? Reading? Was she troubled still? How had his daughter’s afternoon proceeded in his absence?

He grieved for Julia, for surely Miranda’s outburst in front of the Allans had afforded her the intimation that something was askew. Had Miranda told her aunt what she had told him about her discovery at the village hall? Or had Julia gently winkled it out of Miranda? And what of Madrun? Before he had driven off to the hospital, he had warned her of the need for circumspection. But had she heeded his warning? Had she been down to the post office with the news? Well, what did it matter? In a village, he was learning, gossip spreads like a stain. Soon, very soon, Alastair would find villagers turning away from him in the road or avoiding him in the pub—the rituals of shunning. Perhaps he wouldn’t care. But Julia would suffer.
How could she remain married to someone such as he?
they would whisper.
How could she show herself in the church and work with Colm
Parry?
Quickly, very quickly, suspicion would seep into the Old School Room, and the detectives there would sharpen their focus to a fine point.

But what hard evidence would they have to make a charge against Alastair? Tom walked around the parapet and lifted his eyes to the hills, to the counterpane of parcelled fields on the horizon, luminescent green in the buttery sunshine. His eyes travelled along the tidy border of beech trees, darker green, that bounded Thorn Creek’s gentle entrance into the river Dart, down to the first of Thornford’s cottages, to the quay where the boats docked, to the Waterside Café on its promontory by the weir, and to the millpond, placid and silvery, its surface broken by nothing more than the chevron wake of a swan, a white speck from this great height. Six days ago, at the May Fayre in Purton Farm, in a mood of willful romance, feeling for the first time fully settled into his new life, he had viewed this cultivated landscape, as tidy as the borders on Mitsuko’s memory quilts, as impossibly inviolate. This day, this hour, he felt poor in wisdom.

No clue that he knew of survived fourteen months of Peter Kinsey’s absence. If Alastair had left any evidence of his presence in the vestry that evening (and he most surely had; didn’t murderers always take something away and leave something behind? He had heard that on television), then it had vanished in the day-by-day traffic in and out of the tiny room. Colonel Northmore had memory of one piece of evidence that Alastair had been in the vestry that evening, but the colonel was silenced forever now. Tom agonised, as he had agonised in the hospital room, hastily praying over the colonel’s body as the nurse ushered Dr. Vikram into the room, whether to voice his alarm. Alastair had not spoken to him under the seal of the confessional in the colonel’s room, but neither had he admitted to any wrongdoing. He knew, too, from Lisbeth’s conversation, after a glass of wine or two—this before Miranda was born—when they discussed the home truths of church and medicine, that death was
lent a hand in hospitals, quietly, surreptitiously, none the wiser. Alastair was correct: The local health authority would reject any allegation of euthanasia by the back door and erect a defensive wall around any doctor accused.

And what of Sybella? Granted, the Twelve Drummers Drumming, their teacher, Julia, and whoever else had traipsed through the village hall last Monday had contaminated any crime scene, but surely the scene-of-crime officers had pulled some sort of rabbit out of a hat—that is, some strand of hair or flake of skin or
some bloody thing
out of the drum that pointed indelibly to the culprit.

Tom leaned forwards and glanced down through an embrasure in the tower’s crenellations at the crown of the yew tree below, looking for all the world like a great green unfurled umbrella. He was reminded not of Julia, with whom he had circled the very tree only the other day, but of Lisbeth, of kissing her under the yew tree in St. Oswald’s churchyard, in Grasmere, in the Lakes, on their honeymoon. He felt a stab of intense yearning for her, if not for her shrewd counsel alone, for she could take a priestly Gordian knot and slice it with a bold stroke. While he could no more share the secrets of the confessional with her than she could share patients’ medical confidences with him, he would have been able to sidle up to her with a discreet question or two. She would smile—she would know there was a subtext to his query—but she would not pry. If she were here today, he would ask her, “Why did you break it off with Alastair Hennis?” And she would answer lightheartedly, as it was a question he had asked, long ago, at that Cambridge noodle bar: “Because he was so very predictable, darling.” Even when Alastair had continued to court Julia, Lisbeth had mocked it as only another example of his lack of imagination, as if the Rose sisters came as a sort of job lot, one as suitable as the other, though Tom believed, without Lisbeth confirming, that a modicum of spite had provoked Alastair’s attention to the younger sister, a getting back, made more triumphant by a lavish wedding, which Lisbeth suffered through as maid of honour.
“Why did you break it off with Alastair?” She had never said. But Tom thought he now understood why. Lisbeth had intuited a profound absence at the very heart of Alastair’s being.

He shifted down the parapet to better view the churchyard to the south and west—Mitsuko’s view, he presumed, the one in the missing quilt, which she had said looked out to the quay and the river beyond. It was the view he had taken in earlier, only this time he let his eyes travel down to the graves, the slightly irregular rows of grey, brown, and black lozenges bursting from the grass, most plain, some adorned with crosses, others fronting marble platforms so they looked like headboards on vacant beds. He watched the Peterborough couple, two tiny dolls, toddling between the rows, pausing now and again. He considered that they might have been exploring the wrong end of the graveyard, perhaps having read the map upside down, but eventually the woman settled on a marker and called her husband over, though Tom could hear no sound in the wind other than the cry of gulls hovering over the millpond. Both hunched to read the inscription. Tom realised this was not only very much the view Mitsuko had captured in her photograph, but the situation, too: bottoms up. Bottoms, nice, pear-shaped female ones, were quite fanciable—an intrusive thought on this grimmest of afternoons—but from a hundred feet in the air he could barely distinguish the male Peterborian’s from the female’s. Little wonder Mitsuko had spared no time to attach a name to an arse. Even faces, he recognised when the pair unbent and walked around the gravestone (as if there were something written on the other side), were only vaguely hominoid from a height.

But the mechanical eye of a digital camera was like the Eye of Providence. It saw all. And what it saw could be downloaded into a computer and all the fine details made magnificent on a radiant screen—the back of a shoe, a trouser cuff, a belt, a shirt pattern, a hand, a fingernail, a wedding ring, a Gladstone bag. Mitsuko had shot high-resolution pictures and she had shot many. Who knows
what else she had captured of the graveyard that April twilight more than a year ago?

Tom cast his eyes towards the far reach of the graveyard, between the stone wall and the beech tree, where Sybella’s grave lay still mounded with fresh red Devon soil. He had not known the Reverend Peter Kinsey; the colonel he did know—or, rather,
had
known—and respected, but the colonel’s great age, his having lived, as they said at funeral teas, “a full life,” tempered his sense of loss. It was Sybella’s death that tore at Tom’s heart. She was a young woman of nineteen—only ten years older than his beautiful Miranda—who by fits and starts had been emerging from the mucky chrysalis of adolescence into a promisingly sane adult. He tried to suppress his loathing for Alastair, remembering that he had been prepared to say the words of absolution:

But now he would prefer that justice, not mercy, rain down. He looked again at Sybella’s grave, headstone and marble slab still to arrive, noting the Peterborians zigzagging in its direction, as aware as anyone, likely, if they took a newspaper or watched television, of the week’s events in Thornford. He watched the couple stare at the mound, then the man draw the woman to him, as if the sight had triggered some private grief. They stood intertwined for a moment
at the foot of Sybella’s grave, then separated, the man moving up the slope, the woman pausing at Ned Skynner’s grave, bending to read the inscription. Her elbow crooked. She appeared to be calling out to her husband, as if the Skynners bore some familial relationship, but he’d disappeared below the branches of a spreading chestnut, and soon she moved to catch him up. They would shortly reappear on the path along the terrace back towards the church, Tom was certain, but his attraction to their excursion had evaporated. It was Ned’s grave, and Sybella’s, that lingered in his imagination—and then, as imagination will, sent him tripping down neural pathways, synapses firing like Roman candles: the untidy state of Red Ned’s grave despite Fred’s reputation for sterling earthworks, the absence of a prominent Thornfordian at Mitsuko’s exhibition opening, Lisbeth’s remarks in that Cambridge noodle bar, the astonishing nature of hubris. All these thoughts scattered randomly as stars in a galaxy until, suddenly, by some nameless force, they began to turn and swirl and coalesce into one burning white-hot sun and he felt the searing heat of certainty. He didn’t know how long he stood there on the parapet, his hands gripping a merlon, but when he reawakened to the wind and the sky, his palms had become pressed with the pattern of the rough stone. He would, he knew, have to move Heaven—at least its corporeal representatives—and earth—literally—to atone for his folly.

And there was almost no time left.